The Concept of the Yale-New Haven
Teachers Institute:
The Primacy of Teachers

by James R. Vivian

For several years the national concern about the condition of
secondary education, especially in our urban high schools, has been deep
and widespread. With the numerous education studies and reports that were
released and publicized in 1983, the critical scrutiny of our public
schools reached the highest level in two decades. We place enormous demands
upon public education in America. Many believe that our system of
government, our economic productivity, and our social cohesiveness all
depend on free and universal secondary education. Yet analysts in the
public and private sectors assert, and such statistical measures as the
long-term decline of Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores have appeared to
confirm, that high schools graduate many students who are ill-prepared to
enter either college or the workforce and to undertake their civic and
social responsibilities. Public confidence in our schools has been eroded,
and salaries and public esteem for teachers are low.

For their own part, secondary school administrators and teachers
complain that they are battered by bad publicity and besieged by frequent
changes in what colleges, parents, and the public want students to learn,
and that the educational progress is impeded by financial, political, and
social problems of unmanageable proportions. Declining enrollments and
financial constraints have caused an unprecedented reduction in the demand
for teachers, while by the mid-1980s the supply of new teacher graduates
will not meet even this reduced demand. Already there is a shortage of
qualified teachers in some regions of the country and in some fields,
notably science and mathematics. Yet college students interested in
teaching hear about the bleak prospects they might face in finding a job,
or in supporting a family if they do. Many are discouraged from entering
the profession, while some individuals already in the profession are
leaving teaching for more lucrative employment.

The New Haven Public Schools are no exception: more than 60% of their
secondary students come from families receiving some form of public
assistance; 83% are either black or hispanic; 45% of those entering the 9th
grade do not graduate. Absenteeism and the high mobility of students among
schools impair the ability of teachers to plan a logical sequence for
learning in their courses. The turnover of teachers presently is only 2%,
and about half of New Haven secondary teachers teach subjects in which they
did not major in college or graduate school. Many report, not surprisingly,
that teaching has become more stressful.

As early as 1980 two national panels issued their findings on the state
of student learning in the sciences and the humanities. A joint National
Science Foundation/Department of Education study spoke of "a trend toward
virtual scientific and technological illiteracy." The Commission on the
Humanities concluded that "a dramatic improvement in the quality of
education in our elementary and secondary schools is the highest
educational priority in the 1980s." The Commission called for curricula to
teach children "to read well, to write clearly and to think critically."
They also found that "the need to interrelate the humanities, social
sciences, science and technology has probably never been greater than
today."

These problems are no less important to Yale than national problems in
secondary education are to universities generally, and Yale's reasons for
becoming involved transcend altruism or a sense of responsibility to the
New Haven community. As Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti pointed out in
an interview on the December 7, 1980, David Susskind television program,
"it is profoundly in our self-interest to have coherent, well-taught,
well-thought-out curricula" in our local schools, and in secondary schools
throughout the country. Yale acted upon this view in 1970, when the History
Department began the History Education Project (HEP), which assisted a
number of New Haven social studies teachers in developing improved
curricula for courses in American history, world area studies, and urban
studies.

The success of HEP led to discussions about organizing a more ambitious
and demanding program which would include additional disciplines. This was
a specific response to the general question: How can institutions located
in center-city areas become constructively involved in addressing problems
of the communities where they reside, and on which they depend? The way
that Yale and New Haven answered this question, we believed, might be of
interest to universities and school systems elsewhere.

Teachers and administrators from the University and the Schools quickly
reached a consensus: The relationship between the University and the
Schools must be both prominent and permanent within any viable larger
relationship between Yale and New Haven, and, of the many ways Yale might
aid New Haven, none is more logical or defensible than a program that
shares Yale's educational resources with the Schools. Because of changing
student needs, changing objectives set by the school system and each level
of government, and changing scholarship, school curricula undergo constant
revision. Because of Yale's strength in the academic disciplines, all
agreed that developing curricula, further preparing teachers in the
subjects they teach, and assisting teachers to keep abreast of changes in
their fields were the ways that Yale could most readily assist the
Schools.

The intent was not to create new resources at Yale; rather, it was to
make available in a planned way our existing strength, that is, to expand
and institutionalize the work of University faculty members with their
colleagues in the Schools. Even at this early stage, both Yale and the
Schools sought a course of action that might have a substantial impact. The
objective was eventually to involve as many teachers and subjects as
possible, so that the program might address the school curricula, and thus
students' education, broadly. The Teachers Institute was established, then,
in 1978 as a joint program of Yale University and the New Haven Public
Schools, and designed to strengthen teaching and thereby to improve student
learning in the humanities and the sciences in our community's middle and
high schools.

From the outset, teachers have played a leading role in determining how
Yale and the school system together can help them meet the needs of all
their students, not only the needs of students who later will enter
college. The Institute seeks to involve all teachers who state an interest
in one of our seminars and who can demonstrate the relation of their
Institute work to courses they will teach in the coming year. The Institute
does not involve a special group of teachers who teach a special group of
students; rather, it is an intensive effort to assist teachers throughout
the school system, grades 7-12.

Each year about 80 New Haven school teachers become Fellows of the
Institute to work with Yale faculty members on topics the teachers
themselves have identified. Many of the University's most distinguished
faculty have given talks and led seminars in the program. Seminar topics
have included geology, the environment, medical imaging, student writing,
drama, British studies, the arts and material culture, the American family,
society and literature in Latin America, and a variety of other topics in
literature, history, and culture. In a rigorous four-and-one-half month
program of talks, workshops, and seminars, teachers study these subjects
and prepare new curricular materials that they and other teachers will use
in the coming school year. The materials that Fellows write are compiled
into a volume for each seminar and distributed to all New Haven teachers
who might use them. Teams of seminar members promote widespread use of
these materials by presenting workshops for colleagues during the school
year.

In 1980 the Commission on the Humanities cited the Teachers Institute as
a promising model of university-school collaboration that "integrates
curriculum development with intellectual renewal for teachers." In 1982, in
awarding a second three-year grant to the Institute, the National Endowment
for the Humanities expressed the hope that the program would become
permanent and that universities and schools in other communities would
establish similar programs for their mutual benefit. In 1984 the American
Association for Higher Education recognized the Institute as a pioneering
and nationally important program with an exemplary approach for improving
public secondary education. As we anticipated, there is now widespread
interest in what we have accomplished in New Haven; it therefore seems
timely to set forth the conceptual bases for our approach.

Four principles, all implanted in the first institute in 1978, and each
shaped over time by experience, guide the program and constitute much of
its distinctiveness. They are: (I) our belief in the fundamental importance
of the classroom teacher and of teacher-developed materials for effective
learning; (2) our insistence that teachers of students at different levels
interact as colleagues, addressing the common problems of teaching their
disciplines; (3) our conviction that any effort to improve teaching must be
"teacher-centered" and our consequent dependence on the Institute
coordinators, teachers in each school, who meet weekly with the director
and who constitute an essential part of the program's leadership; and (4)
our certainty that the University can assist in improving the public
schools only if we make a significant and long-term commitment to do
so.

We stress that public school teachers should write curricula for their
own classrooms because our main concerns are for the further preparation of
each teacher accepted as an Institute Fellow and for the development in
depth of new materials and approaches for classroom use. In applying to the
Institute, teachers describe topics they most want to develop; Yale faculty
circulate seminar proposals related to these topics; and the coordinators,
after canvassing other teachers, ultimately select which seminars will be
offered.

In effect, New Haven teachers determine the subject matter for the
program each year. The seminars have two related and equally important
purposes: general study of the seminar subject and research and writing on
individual curriculum units. By writing a curriculum unit, teachers think
formally about the ways in which what they are learning can be applied in
their own teaching; we emphasize that the Institute experience must have a
direct bearing on their own classes. Each Fellow devises a unit related to
the general topic of his or her seminar, reads independently toward that
unit, writes several drafts, and presents work in progress to the others in
the seminar. The units that emerge reflect both the direction provided by
the Yale faculty and the experience gained by each teacher in the
classroom, his or her sense of what will work for students.

This balance between academic preparation and practical, classroom
application--as well as the depth and duration of our local collaborative
relationship--are the central features of the Yale-New Haven Teachers
Institute. Our outside evaluator in 1980, Professor Robert Kellogg, Dean of
the College at the University of Virginia, points out:

That Yale does not have a school or a department of Education
is in this instance a blessing. Without an intermediary buffer, softening,
exaggerating, or explaining away the contrast of intellectual milieu
between secondary education and higher education, the two groups of
teachers (the Institute Fellows and the Yale faculty) are free to explore
for themselves the extent to which they share values and assumptions about
their subject and its role in the development of children's minds and
characters.

The Institute is the only interschool and interdisciplinary forum
enabling school teachers to work with each other and with Yale faculty. In
referring to the collegial spirit of the program, we are speaking of a
dynamic process that brings together individuals who teach very different
students at different levels of their subjects, and who bring to the
program a variety of perspectives and strongly held points of view. The
tensions and disagreements that arise from these different perspectives are
a source of vitality and innovation. Each challenges the preconceptions of
the other with the result that University faculty understand something more
about teaching at the secondary level while school teachers often
reconsider their expectations of their students' ability to learn. With our
emphasis on the authority of the secondary school teacher, the bond between
Fellows and Yale faculty is one of mutual respect and a shared commitment
to the best education for New Haven students.

The Institute is organized to foster this sense of collegiality. Fellows
are not students paying tuition for regular, graduate-level courses.
Instead, teachers are remunerated, each Fellow receiving an honorarium on
successful completion of the program. As full members of the Yale
community, Fellows are listed in the University Directory of faculty and
staff; this has symbolic meaning in recognizing them as colleagues and
practical value in making Yale resources readily accessible to them.
Through the Institute, teachers gain access to human and physical resources
throughout the University, not only to those specifically organized by the
Institute.

Also, the seminars are conducted in an informal, flexible style--a
tradition established by the first group of Yale faculty who taught in the
program, and maintained by some continuity of faculty and faculty meetings
with the coordinators and director. This makes the Institute completely
unlike the graduate-level courses in education most of the Fellows have
taken, and often unlike the graduate seminars most of the Yale faculty
ordinarily teach.

In order to practice collegiality in the day-to-day workings of the
Institute, we devised an administrative structure that would reflect the
primacy of teachers. We did not wish the program to be something concocted
by Yale and imposed upon the Fellows, nor did we wish to create different
classes of Fellows by involving New Haven school administrators in
administrative roles in the Institute. At the most practical level, we
hoped to use peers to solve problems of absence or lateness, in order to
avoid placing the Yale faculty in authoritarian roles. The coordinators
have provided a solution to all these potential difficulties. Again,
Professor Kellogg's report puts the matter well:

In order that the "managerial" aspect of the school
administration not be reflected in the operation of the Institute, a small
group of teachers, the Institute coordinators, serves to "represent" both
the schools in the Institute and the Institute in the schools. The
conception is ingenious, and the individuals who serve as coordinators are,
more than any other single element, crucial to the Institute's successful
operation. The coordinators I met were thoughtful and intelligent men and
women who understood the purpose of the Institute and were effective
representatives of the two institutions of which they were members.

Through the coordinators, who collectively represent every middle
and high school teacher in the humanities and in the sciences, teachers are
directly involved in the cyclical planning, conduct, evaluation, and
refinement of the program. Through them we have developed and maintained
both rigorous expectations and an accommodating schedule so that there has
been a high level of participation by New Haven teachers. Between 1978 and
1982 40% of New Haven secondary school teachers in the humanities and the
sciences successfully completed at least one year of the Institute. The
evaluation of the Coordinators by participating Fellows confirms their
crucial role; one Fellow wrote, "as long as there are teacher coordinators,
the program will belong to all the participants." This proprietary feeling
of teachers toward the Institute, the feeling that it is
"teacher-centered," is essential to our success.

To participate in so demanding a program, teachers must believe that the
Institute can assist them in their own teaching and that, by extension, it
can eventually improve teaching and learning throughout the schools. Our
evaluator in 1981, Ernest L. Boyer, wrote in his report:

The project has teacher-coordinators in each participating
school who clearly are committed and who pass on their enthusiasm to
colleagues. One of the most impressive features of my visit was the after
school session I had with these coordinators from the New Haven schools.
Arriving after a fatiguing day, the teachers turned, with enthusiasm, to
key issues. How can the Institute best help us meet our goals? How can we
improve our work? . . . The dedication and optimism of these teachers was
impressive, almost touching. . . . The significance of teacher leadership
cannot be overstated.

Using common sense, we know that the impact of the Institute will
be roughly proportional to the number of teachers who participate on a
recurring basis. The impact of the Institute on teachers' preparation and
curricula is cumulative; we must annually involve a large enough proportion
of New Haven teachers to be credible in claiming that their participation
can improve the public schools. Each curriculum unit written by a teacher
represents only a fraction of all he or she teaches, and the very nature of
the academic disciplines and their teaching is not static, but constantly
changing. Should the Institute ever become so limited in scope or duration
as to appear trivial, it would cease to attract a sizable percentage of New
Haven teachers and would become ineffectual. In one of its principal
recommendations the Commission on the Humanities concluded

Because schools change slowly, we endorse models of
school-college collaboration that emphasize long-term cooperation. We
recommend that more colleges or universities and school districts adopt
such programs for their mutual benefit, and that funding sources sustain
programs and administrative costs on a continuing basis. Programs of
school-college collaboration offer the best opportunity to strengthen
instruction in the schools while providing intellectual renewal for
teachers.

It is therefore most encouraging that, after five years of
developing the Teachers Institute as a model of university-school
collaboration, Yale decided to seek a $4-million endowment to give the
program a secure future.

There is, in my view, no more important recommendation in the
Carnegie Foundation Special Report on Schooland College than
the one--contained also in the Carnegie Report on High School--that
calls for universities and schools to develop genuine partnerships based on
the needs of schools as determined by their principals and teachers. Both
aspects of that recommendation are essential: not only that universities
and schools work together, but especially that those of us in higher
education encourage our colleagues in schools to show us the ways we can
marshall our resources to address their needs.

Not all teachers are sanguine about the prospects for public secondary
education. But the vision of the Institute, which many share, is that the
problems confronting us are not intractable, and that working through the
Institute teachers can improve the education and the lives of their
students.

Efforts at school improvement will not succeed without teacher
leadership. In this country we have too long held teachers responsible for
the condition of our schools without giving them responsibility--empowering
them--to improve our schools. This fundamental precept has proved
indispensable to the success of our Teachers Institute and will continue to
guide our work.